Is there an active railroad bridge today at the site where the locomotives reside?

There is, but I think it is in the same location as the bridge which failed. Since the general location is known of two of the locomotives, the elusive 4076 I believe is pretty close by..

I was just thinking that if the locomotive site still has an active railroad bridge, that fact would surely impact any possible recovery; or even just survey activity.

It is true that this lost locomotive legend had abundant credibility, but this is not the only one with such credibility. There is that Rock Island locomotive that was lost in a flood around 1900. What I find provocative about recovering that locomotive is that it is a relatively late 4-4-0.

This is just a guess, but I assume that the majority of 4-4-0s to have survived into the 1930 era were smaller and born earlier than the final 4-4-0 production after 1900. So I speculate that the late-era 4-4-0 may be under represented in the preservation morvement. The 4-4-0 type played out its role on the lightest rail trackage, and the biggest 4-4-0s were too heavy, so they disappeared relatively early.

Unfortunately, as I understand, the R.I. 4-4-0 I mention is in close proximity to a railroad bridge, and an earlier recovery plan was quashed by the railroad company owning the bridge.

Another one; the Churchill Tunnel locomotive is well documented with 100% credibility. That is quite the haunted “lost train” legend. It is history sealed up in a time capsule.

I found it interesting that the photo in this particular set of the Santa Fe bridge mentions four (4) AT&SF locomotives lost. This is the first I heard of a fourth locomotive and I assume that since all of the other references are just of the two Mikes and the single 2-6-2, that this report is in error. Or perhaps the Santa Fe was able to recover the fourth engine. In any event, I thought it was a rather interesting little tidbit.

Les

Someone call the Discover Channel - or the History Channel.

I'll watch for sure - and maybe we'll get a new old steam locomotive out of the deal!

/Mitch

Between the three of them. I'm sure you could piece together one locomotive and an aux tender. Many of the parts of the 3160's and 4000 Class were interchangable,
and you just never know...they might all be restorable..

P.S. Sent an email to a "bonehunter" last night and hope to get a response before the end of the weekend...he's on a dig at the moment.....

Hah! I tried to sell Discovery on fishing a CPR 2-8-0 off the floor of a lake in Brit. Columbia. Be certain you write your proposal up well!
But still, if you're going ahead with such a project, you should leave no stone unturned.

I love archaeology for just the reason of bringing something back into the light.

might be a job for satellite radar that can pierce the ground.

I wonder if there are public satellite resources available.

I do not know of any technology that could image locomotives buried in water-saturated soil such as a silt or mud river bottom. If a locomotive were buried in dry soil, ground penetrating radar could image it, but it would be a vague image.

A magnetometer would not provide an image, but it would provide a signature of the magnetic anomaly, no matter whether it is in wet or dry soil. That signature would indicate the location, depth, and approximate mass. It does not prove the item to be a locomotive, but only proves it to be a ferric mass.

But if you have historic information indicating the probability of a lost locomotive in a certain area, and the magnetometer indicates a ferric mass of a couple hundred tons, it will reinforce the probability of the existence of the locomotive. Part of magnetometer searches is the anticipated target item. So a big anomaly could be anything, but it has to be plausible. On the other hand, if there is no big anomaly, there can be no locomotive.

What Ron said.